


Echo

by Thistlerose



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Daughters, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-22
Updated: 2011-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:12:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nine-year-old Joanna McCoy collects seashells.  Her father and her Uncle Jim send her specimens from distant worlds.  (Could be read as gen or Kirk/McCoy.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echo

Joanna takes the shells out of their box one by one, and lays them carefully on her desk. According to the note, written in Uncle Jim’s messy scrawl, the pink one is from Tanar II, a planet thirty-five light years from Earth. That means, she knows, that the sunlight that warmed Uncle Jim and her daddy when they walked along that distant shore and picked up this shell for her won’t reach Earth for another thirty-five years.

At nine, she can’t quite wrap her head around time dilation, but she understands that much.

The purple fan-shaped shell is from Eldera IV, which is even farther away than Tanar. Joanna knows that her daddy and Uncle Jim got into some sort of trouble there; in his note, Uncle Jim wrote: _glad to put that planet behind us!_ It’s distressingly vague. Joanna has an active imagination; she can think of all sorts of horrible scenarios, and it doesn’t help at all when her mom tells her not to worry.

She’s a McCoy, damnit. She worries about everything.

The long, twisted shell is from Pelendra. Joanna thinks it looks a bit like a unicorn’s horn, except for the fact that it’s hollow and there’s an opening at the base. In shadow, it looks dull and off-white, but when she holds it up to the morning like spilling through her window, it shimmers like a rainbow.

Jim wrote, _You wouldn’t believe the creature that used to live in this! Never seen so many tentacles on one animal. Like a plate of spaghetti. One of these guys - not this one - almost drowned me, but Spock and your daddy saved my life._

Joanna sighs. She worries, but she’s glad that Uncle Jim has her daddy and Commander Spock to keep him safe. She’s glad her daddy and Commander Spock - whom she only met once, but whom she sort of likes - have him.

She picks up the shell from Tanar II and holds it to her ear. Long ago, when her parents were still married and used to take her to collect shells by the Atlantic, Joanna believed it was the ocean she was hearing, and she used to lie in bed with a shall to her ear, her eyes closed, pretending she was still at the beach.

Now, of course, she knows it’s the echo of her own blood rushing through the blood vessels in her ear. But she closes her eyes anyway, and imagines she’s hearing the waves pounding up the gray sand beach on Tanar II. She imagines a whole bunch of pink shells, strewn like dogwood petals across the sand, and her daddy and Uncle Jim walking among them, picking them up and putting them down again, trying to find the perfect one to send to her.

Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Maybe she’s wrong to imagine the sky as pale lavender, or clumps of shiny black seaweed caught among the rocks. Maybe it was actually night. Maybe there were some sort of alien birds. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t really care.

Her daddy and her Uncle Jim were thinking about her on a faraway planet. She knows that much is accurate.

2/20/2011


End file.
